The current state of the public email system is a mess. The public email system or common email system was originally designed as a simple way to send written communication utilizing a burgeoning internet. Early Users were college professors and government personnel who were inherently trusted individuals who had little reason to perpetrate scams or spam. Accordingly, email was not designed with security in mind. On the contrary, the current public email system has been built with anonymity and unlimited public access as a priority. It is these two characteristics which have ultimately proved to limit the functionality of email to the transfer of non-sensitive information. Today, anyone anywhere can send as many emails as they wish to send, to as many people as they wish from an anonymous address. A sender of an email has no control over the security procedures of a recipient in an email transaction and the sender lacks visibility into the channel and thus cannot verify the legal identity of the recipient before a message is sent, whereby the legal identity is the identity which is same identity represented to the government for the individual or business.
Due to the lack of controls for identifying the sender and holding the sender accountable, the current email system is wrought with scams and spam, marketing email messages sent to mass audiences of recipients who did not opt to receive these messages, usually from an anonymous source. Spam filters are well know technologies that attempt to filter spam messages prior to those messages reaching an recipient's inbox and are only partially effective, creating a nuisance for recipients. Just as importantly, false positives by spam filters (falsely identifying legitimate email as spam) are detrimental to the current email system. False positives on spam filters filter out a significant portion of legitimate and even important mail and there is absolutely no assurance that an email sent will ever reach its destination. This lack of assurance is a major factor that prohibits email from being used for many purposes where the sender needs reasonable certainty that a message has been received and that the message was sent to the correct person.
The security of the email path is also a major problem with the current public email system. A sender of an email has little assurance that the message will be encrypted throughout its electronic path to the recipient. In fact, it is highly likely that the email message will be unencrypted at some point in its path. This allows sophisticated sniffers to be used by hackers to detect and fetch sensitive information in email traffic, enabling vast opportunity for theft and fraud.
Thus, it is desirable to provide a Publicly Available Protected Electronic Mail System that overcomes the limitations of the conventional email system and the current email system's inability to provide a secure and protected medium for the exchange of sensitive messages, and it is to this end that the present invention is directed.